Yojimbo
Screening: 22 May 2006
Japan 1961
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Leading players ~ Toshirô Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yôko Tsukasa.
106 minutes (subtitles)
Synopsis
A stranger passes the length of a small town. The deserted street is dusty and windswept. The walk is cool and rhythmic, the music equally so. You get the picture. The scene is 1860s Japan and the stranger is a masterless samurai looking for employment - a sword for hire. In westerns the lone figure is a good guy, basically honest under his tough exterior and ready to help the goodies against the baddies. In Yojimbo, Kurosawa joyfully demolishes the clichés.Sanjuro (Mifune) arrives in a town where two equally villainous and horrible gangs are vying for control of the gambling rights. Sanjuro finds both factions so grotesquely wicked that he decides to set them against each other. Obviously he means to be last man standing. Things are further complicated for him by the arrival of the son of one of the gangsters, Unosuke (Nakadai), with a fearsome new invention, a revolver. We are spared many scenes of violence but as the villains are so villainous we are happily behind Sanjuro as he plots to despatch all those too horrible to live - almost everybody in fact.
Toshiro Mifune starred in many of Kurosawa's weightier films of the1950s and here he is equally compelling as a sword-carrying mercenary who kills with great skill and verve in an electrifying burst of action. His walk has the bravado and slow rhythmic footfall we have come to expect of deadly strangers in many westerns that followed. This was Kurosawa's most successful film in Japan and became much copied in spaghetti westerns. A Fistful of Dollars (1964) in particular is recognisable as being directly influenced by the style and story of this earlier film.
The design and visualisation of the sets is brilliant as always with Kurosawa's films and much credit for the look must go to cinematographer Kuzua Miyagawa who worked with this director for many years. The distinctive music, which has become such a feature of this genre, was composed by Masaru Sato.
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Film Facts
'Kurosawa has made the first great shaggy man movie...a glorious comedy-satire of force: the story of the bodyguard who kills the bodies he is hired to guard.'Pauline Kael
Yojimbo means 'bodyguard' in Japanese.
Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays the flamboyant, pistol-waving Unosuke here, also plays the main villain role in the Yojimbo sequel, Sanjûrô (1962).
Yojimbo is an uncredited film version of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest. The book is about a detective who comes to a small city and sets two sides of a gang war against one another until both are almost completely wiped out.
George Lucas, a known Kurosawa fan, filmed Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) under the false name Blue Harvest to maintain secrecy and to make an inside reference to his favourite director, Akira Kurosawa.
